Excel based Add-ins to Increase Your Productivity

We will continue with our journey of finding excel add-in that boosts productivity of excel users. In our previous post we discussed excel add-in that are most popular among excel users. Since the list was complete, we will continue with the same topic in this post as well.

Duplicate Finder and Delete add in:

This is a very handy excel add-in designed to get rid of one of the most common problems we face with our data – that is duplicates. Presence of duplicates in the data-set can cause problem in analysis besides makes it difficult to manage data. There are options available to handle such entities by using excels’ parent features. But using this add-in makes handling duplicates a breeze.

This excel add-in comes with options to handle a single list, couple of lists and with a bunch of option to do more with duplicates.

The operations that can be performed on a single list are present in first tab. This tab includes options to highlight just duplicate rows in a list, to copy or to delete such identified rows. Further it has option to find and copy or delete the first occurrences of the duplicate rows – means that for duplicate rows, the first instance can be either highlighted, copied or deleted.

The operations that can be performed on more then one – or two list are present in the second tab. The tab give us option to color, mark, copy or delete that are present in first list from the second list or vice versa.

The last tab has options for coloring rows when entries changes, extracting unique lists, select a range of cells and highlight duplicates within it or within a selection of row or blank entries in a row when a duplicate row is located. The add-in is available at a one off price of $24.

Report Runner Add-in:

Some we have to print multiple reports at once. This happens most often when we have to attend a meeting or submit some report where we need to print a lot of different documents. For such situations we can revert to Report runner add-ins that can print multiple excel sheets at once.

This add-in eliminates the problem of shuffling through the folders for printing. The ability of add-in to remember the books and marks makes printing easier a lot. All we need to do is to configure the add-in once for the task.

Macabacus:

This is one the most widely used add-in by the financial market, infect this said to be the favorite of Wall Street’s financial market. This single add-in has dozen of feature that are liked by professional and beginner level users equally. We will discuss the most important one’s one by one.

Formatting:

Font Colors:

The users have multitude of options of change font colors. A user can choose between blue-black combinations, choose from the most recently and frequently used font colors and / or default font colors. The user may also choose to recolor all colors used in the sheets.

Number formats:

The add-in has option to cycle through different number format with shortcut keys like increase or decrease number of decimal places, put commas, use percentage format or others.

Borders:

The add-in has option to format all four sides of borders with shortcut keys, inside and outside border and no border at all.

Alignment of Cells:

Cycles exists for alignment of text for horizontal and vertical alignment (left, right, center, top, bottom, and center) and for indent increase and decrease indents.

Row and cell Options:

We have options to set cell heights and width (row height and column width), to auto fit to row height and few other options.

Sheets:

We can hide, unhide, move sheet to left or right or programmatically hide the sheet so that no one can unhide it.

Auditing formulas:

The auditing formula toolbar named pro precedent and pro precedent can help us edit ranges, drill down formulas, move and resize, group or ungroup formulas. It also allows for checking dependencies for chart and names and for editing formulas.

Bing Maps:

Sales and marketing people are always looking for charts that displays figures over map or territories. This chart is for the same purpose. The Bing Map plot data points on map from Bing Map. The data is stored in a table. Once the addin is activated we can select data using the pin on the top right of the map. We need to have a table with header that is to be select and data following it without any gaps.

We can select single or multiple locations to plot data. If more than one location is selected that data is plotted with different colors.

Geographic Heat Map:

This is another charting add-in from Microsoft that produces heat map with different colors to represent the data. In heat maps, the brighter colors the higher are the values, and the lower colors represent lower values. The addin has ability to read data from the sheets and send it over internet.

Infor F9 Add-in for Financial Analysis and Modeling:

This is again a specialized add-in with its focus on financial professionals doing financial modeling and analysis. The add-in benefits from the point that it is designed to take into account the entire ERP system of the organization. And besides that it works with in Excel Environment. It supports ers system like Microsoft dynamics, SAP, sage, blackbaud, data pro and many more.

The addin offers cell based reporting, consolidation of data, drill down tools, budgeting, multi-currency, report analysis, pivot table, and many more. Once you get and implement it, you will not need to create any report manually.

Radial Bar Charts by MS:

This is another initiative add-in that is used to draw the radial charts. These charts are characterized by data being plotted around a center point. If you look closely, it resembles the default dough nut chart in excel when plotted for multiple variables.

The add-in is beneficial from the point that it is a dedicated tool and makes plotting such charts easy. However the add-in is free only for a limited time.

HierView:

If you want to describe your data in hierarchy or have already hierarchical data, then this is the excel add-in you should use. The add-in helps by plotting hierarchical data. It also provides options to add salient features like average, maximum, minimum and other such parameters to be computed for each element in each hierarchy level. Thus makes it a lot easy to examine the relationship between different level and element in each level.

The Ultimate Dashboard Tools:

This is an excel add-in to develop dashboard and this is one the best available besides “Sparkline for Excel”. The excel add-in offers a spectrum of tools that can be used to create a dashboard. This includes Gauge Charts: Simple Gauge, Dual Gauge, Traffic Light Widgets, Radial Bar Charts, Bullet Charts, Score Meter and Variance Charts, Waterfall, Mekko, Sales Funnel, Tree map, Frequency Distribution and many more.

This is perhaps the largest collection of charts that are offered in a single excel add-in that are not available by default in excel.

Flash Card Assistant:

We can use excel to store question and their answers and then retrieve answers to create flash card. In one column we store question number, followed by question in next column and then in the next column.

The macro in the excel add-in can display question randomly, has option to already known questions and answer sot that they are not displayed, can display questions if it is already marked as known, formatting options for the text displayed, slide show ability and to add hints to the questions.

Audit Toolbar By Excel Zoom:

The Tickmark Toolbar excel add-in specifically designed for Auditors and Accounting professionals. Only symbols that are used by Auditors in their day to day activity are included.

The symbols are added keeping in view the professional requirements of accountants and auditors so list is precise and concise. The list includes symbols like “verified”, “Agrees to GL”, “Agress to PY”, alphabets from A to E and Small Alphabets from “a” to “i” and Numerals from 1-9.